Cloning ques, prior to purchasing

Hi, I have some Newbie questions:
I have an 80 gb drive as a primary and recently got a 60GB drive sitting on my desk. Now my 80 drive has 4 partitions (20GB each) and a total of only 50GB worth of data on it. Will TrueImage allow me to clone entirely the 80GB drive over to the 60GB (ie cloning from a larger disk to smaller one) As I said before the 80GB drive only has 50GB worth of data so it should fit into the 60gb drive.
Also, once the clone is completed, so I have to physically dissconnect the cloned drive or can I leave it plugged in the slave slot, without windows getting confused that there are 2 copies of its OS on the computer.
Thanks for clearing up my confusion!

 

The reason I want to clone is that if the 80GB drive suffers failure, I can take it out and plug in the 60gb drive into the primary and be back in business in minutes, and discard the 80gb drive (if need be)

 

Hello Swat,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

If you have enough space on the new hard drive (in your case you do have) you will be able to clone the old disk to the new one. Furthermore, if you choose Automatic mode the space between partitions will be distributed proportionally. In your case you will obtain the new 60Gb hard disk with four partitions of 15Gb each. You may also choose Manual mode and will be able to choose the size of each partition on the target disk. Please note that in this case when you set up the partitioning you will need to decrease the size of one partition to increase the size of another.

If you perform the cloning under Windows you will not have to unplug the old drive. Windows will ask you to reboot the computer and after that please do not power off the computer and do not change anything in it. Wait till the cloning is completed and then you will be able to boot from either hard disk. To do that please choose the appropriate disk in BIOS.

For the detailed information please refer to User's Guide available at http://www.acronis.com/pdf/trueimage8.0_ug.en.pdf

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Wow, thanks for the quick response! I look forward to using TrueImage!